Ralph Ellison

Saul Bellow

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Massachusetts

In this collection of essays and interviews, Ellison writes of literature and folklore, jazz and black culture, and the nature and quality of lives that black Americans lead. This volume includes the critically acclaimed works Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986).

The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison

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Tarana Burke

My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement

"Searing. Powerful. Needed." —Oprah “Sometimes a single story can change the world. Unbound is one of those stories. Tarana’s words are a testimony to liberation and love.” —Brené Brown From the founder and activist behind one of the largest movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the "me too" movement, Tarana Burke debuts a powerful memoir about her own journey to saying those two simple yet infinitely powerful words—me too—and how she brought empathy back to an entire generation in one of the largest cultural events in American history. Tarana didn’t always have the courage to say "me too." As a child, she reeled from her sexual assault, believing she was responsible. Unable to confess what she thought of as her own sins for fear of shattering her family, her soul split in two. One side was the bright, intellectually curious third generation Bronxite steeped in Black literature and power, and the other was the bad, shame ridden girl who thought of herself as a vile rule breaker, not of a victim. She tucked one away, hidden behind a wall of pain and anger, which seemed to work...until it didn’t. Tarana fought to reunite her fractured soul, through organizing, pursuing justice, and finding community. In her debut memoir she shares her extensive work supporting and empowering Black and brown girls, and the devastating realization that to truly help these girls she needed to help that scared, ashamed child still in her soul. She needed to stop running and confront what had happened to her, for Heaven and Diamond and the countless other young Black women for whom she cared. They gave her the courage to embrace her power. A power which in turn she shared with the entire world. Through these young Black and brown women, Tarana found that we can only offer empathy to others if we first offer it to ourselves. Unbound is the story of an inimitable woman’s inner strength and perseverance, all in pursuit of bringing healing to her community and the world around her, but it is also a story of possibility, of empathy, of power, and of the leader we all have inside ourselves. In sharing her path toward healing and saying "me too," Tarana reaches out a hand to help us all on our own journeys.

Unbound

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David Hempton

Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt

David Hempton looks at evangelicalism through the lens of well-known individuals who once embraced the evangelical tradition, but later repudiated it. The author recounts the faith journeys of nine creative artists, social reformers, and public intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. --from publisher description.

Evangelical Disenchantment

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Susan Vreeland

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

The New York Times bestselling luminous tale about art and human experience that is as breathtaking as any Vermeer painting “A little gem of a novel . . . [and a] beautifully written exploration of the power of art.” —Parade A professor invites a colleague from the art department to his home to see a painting that he has kept secret for decades. The professor swears it is a Vermeer—why has he hidden this important work for so long? The reasons unfold in a series of stories that trace ownership of the painting back to World War II and Amsterdam, and still further back to the moment of the work’s inspiration. As the painting moves through each owner’s hands, what was long hidden quietly surfaces, illuminating poignant moments in human lives. Vreeland’s characters remind us, through their love of the mysterious painting, how beauty transforms and why we reach for it, what lasts, and what in our lives is singular and unforgettable.

Girl in Hyacinth Blue

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Amy Ephron

Slight crease on front cover.  Some shelf wear.

A Novel of 1917

A dark romantic novel set during World War I tells the story of a love triangle involving a woman of privilege, her fiance+a7, and an impoverished girl she invites in from the cold, to her own undoing. Reprint.

A Cup of Tea

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Jonathan Collins

Miracles, Mysteries and Epiphanies from Everyday Life

Gathered in coffee houses and cafes, each of the 17 stories found in this unique, inspirational book focuses on a simple truth that enables us to live creatively in a state of gratitude.

Insights from the CoffeeHouse

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Celia Paul

A rich, penetrating memoir about the author's relationship with a flawed but influential figure—the painter Lucian Freud—and the satisfactions and struggles of a life lived through art. One of Britain's most important contemporary painters, Celia Paul has written a reflective, intimate memoir of her life as an artist. Self-Portrait tells the artist's story in her own words, drawn from early journal entries as well as memory, of her childhood in India and her days as a art student at London's Slade School of Fine Art; of her intense decades-long relationship with the older esteemed painter Lucian Freud and the birth of their son; of the challenges of motherhood, the unresolvable conflict between caring for a child and remaining commited to art; of the "invisible skeins between people," the profound familial connections Paul communicates through her paintings of her mother and sisters; and finally, of the mystical presence in her own solitary vision of the world around her. Self-Portrait is a powerful, liberating evocation of a life and of a life-long dedication to art.

Self-Portrait

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Emmanuel Iduma

Teju Cole

Abraham Oghobase

A mesmerising collection of striking travel snapshots

A Stranger's Pose

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Rhonda Byrne

The Greatest Secret, the long-awaited major work by Rhonda Byrne, lays out the next quantum leap in a journey that will take the reader beyond the material world and into the spiritual realm, where all possibilities exist. The book reflects Rhondas own journey, and shares the most direct way out for those experiencing hardship and the path to end pain and suffering endured by so many, and shines a light on a future without anxiety or fear. Filled with accessible practices that can be immediately put to use and profound revelations that take the reader on an incomparable journey, Rhondas discovery is reinforced throughout by the revelatory words of sages from around the world, past and present.

The Greatest Secret

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Albert Camus

Arthur Goldhammer

Alice Kaplan

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

More than fifty years after Algerian independence, Albert Camusâe(tm) Algerian Chronicles appears here in English for the first time. Published in France in 1958, the same year the Algerian War brought about the collapse of the Fourth French Republic, it is one of Camusâe(tm) most political worksâe"an exploration of his commitments to Algeria. Dismissed or disdained at publication, today Algerian Chronicles, with its prescient analysis of the dead end of terrorism, enjoys a new life in Arthur Goldhammerâe(tm)s elegant translation.

âeoeBelieve me when I tell you that Algeria is where I hurt at this moment,âe#157; Camus, who was the most visible symbol of Franceâe(tm)s troubled relationship with Algeria, writes, âeoeas others feel pain in their lungs.âe#157; Gathered here are Camusâe(tm) strongest statements on Algeria from the 1930s through the 1950s, revised and supplemented by the author for publication in book form.

In her introduction, Alice Kaplan illuminates the dilemma faced by Camus: he was committed to the defense of those who suffered colonial injustices, yet was unable to support Algerian national sovereignty apart from France. An appendix of lesser-known texts that did not appear in the French edition complements the picture of a moralist who posed questions about violence and counter-violence, national identity, terrorism, and justice that continue to illuminate our contemporary world.

Algerian Chronicles

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Enrico Pellegrini

A Novel of Love, Wall Street, and Focaccia

Sympathetic, good-for-nothing Rosso Fiorentino leaves the beautiful Italian Riviera to follow the woman he loves to America, and soon finds himself the hero of a darkly funny tale when his improbable business plan becomes the rage on Wall Street. Rosso Fiorentino, a charming loser who dreams of becoming a writer, falls in love with Chloé, a brilliant young woman with a troubled past. They meet in India, where famous Italian novelist the Maestro has decided to spend his last days. They cross paths again in Portofino, and Rosso, following the Maestro's injunction to finally do something worthwhile with his life, enlists the help of his friends, a baker and a street peddler, to follow Chloé to America and sell focaccia on the streets of New York. While Rosso struggles to make a living with odd jobs, Chloé, now armed with a law degree from Chicago, gets hired by a top Wall Street firm. Rosso is eventually able to achieve his dream, opening a little bakery in Queens, followed by a second on Broadway. The business is an instant success. The banks start throwing money at him, and overnight the company undergoes the largest IPO in U.S. history. At least until the bubble bursts and all plays out in a New York courtroom. This modern fairy tale about ambition, hubris, love, and redemption exposes the absurdity of the 2008 global meltdown, and foreshadows the future, all with scintillating wit.

Something Great and Beautiful

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Suzanne Paola

The image of the rose winds through the book, symbol of eternity and transience, gravity and folly. We find it in the ghastly bloom of the atomic bomb, in the relic of St. Therese of Lisieux, in the wool of a cloned sheep. Its image glows silently under the Waste Isolation Projects of Yucca Mountain and New Mexico, in the U.S. Human Radiation Experiments, in the altars constructed at the schoolyard gate of the Columbine massacre. The poems -- witty, sly, sensitive, and immensely informed -- trace the spiritual inquiries of a series of linked personae adrift in bodies and a world made toxic by the residues of scientific experimentation. Paola's dramatic monologues begin and end with the same fictional narrator, a wry, cynical, cake-baking woman who, on learning of the atomic structure of all matter, begins a lifetime of questioning. At times blasphemous, at times poignant and humorous, these voices are never less than heartbreakingly human, and the words they utter chill with their honesty. The Lives of the Saints is a stark, wise, meticulously researched book by a writer whose reputation leaps forward with each publication.

The Lives of the Saints

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Joan Acocella

Here is a dazzling collection from Joan Acocella, one of our most admired cultural critics: thirty-one essays that consider the life and work of some of the most influential artists of our time (and two saints: Joan of Arc and Mary Magdalene). Acocella writes about Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor and chemist, who wrote the classic memoir, Survival in Auschwitz; M.F.K. Fisher who, numb with grief over her husband¿s suicide, dictated the witty and classic How to Cook a Wolf; and many other subjects, including Dorothy Parker, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Saul Bellow. Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints is indispensable reading on the making of art¿and the courage, perseverance, and, sometimes, dumb luck that it requires.

Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints

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Tess Gallagher

Dust jacket has slight crease.  Slight yellowing of pages

"Set primarily in the Northwest, where the author was born and has lived for many years, these stories tell how people do more than cope with the hard turns and shares of their lives. We watch them take the unexpected next step as they face their dilemmas. Whether writing of a woman who discovers that her husband is having an affair after stumbling onto a collection of love letters or of the people who populate the Owl Woman "saloon" of the lead story, Gallagher invents wholly original characters and renders them with lyrical intensity. As with the great short stories of Flannery O'Connor, Gallagher's prose animates the no-nonsense themes of love, human pain, and healing."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

At the Owl Woman Saloon

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David Lebovitz

Delicious Adventures in the World's Most Glorious - and Perplexing - City

American pastry chef and cookbook author David Lebovitz offers a humorous and irreverent account of living as an expatriate in Paris. Includes over fifty recipes.

The Sweet Life in Paris

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Anne Lamott

Some stains and slight creasing on dust jacket.  


Some Thoughts on Faith

From the bestselling author ofOperating InstructionsandBird by Birdcomes a chronicle of faith and spirituality that is at once tough, personal, affectionate, wise and very funny. With an exuberant mix of passion, insight, and humor, Anne Lamott takes us on a journey through her often troubled past to illuminate her devout but quirky walk of faith. In a narrative spiced with stories and scripture, with diatribes, laughter, and tears, Lamott tells how, against all odds, she came to believe in God and then, even more miraculously, in herself. She shows us the myriad ways in which this sustains and guides her, shining the light of faith on the darkest part of ordinary life and exposing surprising pockets of meaning and hope. Whether writing about her family or her dreadlocks, sick children or old friends, the most religious women of her church of the men she's dated, Lamott reveals the hard-won wisdom gathered along her path to connectedness and liberation.

Traveling Mercies

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Andrew Sean Greer

A Novel

A struggling novelist travels the world to avoid an awkward wedding in this hilarious Pulitzer Prize-winning novel full of "arresting lyricism and beauty" (New York Times Book Review). WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE National Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book of 2017 A Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2017 A San Francisco Chronicle Top Ten Book of 2017 Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Lambda Award and the California Book Award "I could not love LESS more."--Ron Charles, Washington Post "Andrew Sean Greer's Less is excellent company. It's no less than bedazzling, bewitching and be-wonderful."--Christopher Buckley, New York Times Book Review Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world. QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town? ANSWER: You accept them all. What would possibly go wrong? Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last. Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love story. A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author The New York Times has hailed as "inspired, lyrical," "elegiac," "ingenious," as well as "too sappy by half," Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.

Less (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

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Erica C. Barnett

A Memoir of Drinking, Relapse, and Recovery

Erica C. Barnett had her first sip of alcohol when she was thirteen, and quickly developed a taste for drinking to oblivion with her friends. In her late twenties, her addiction became inescapable. By the time she was in her late thirties, she had run the gauntlet of alcoholism. With brave and vulnerable writing, Barnett expands on her own story to confront the dire state of addiction today, the rise of alcoholism in women, and the lack of rehabilitation options available. Quitter is essential reading for our age and an ultimately hopeful story of Barnett's own hard-fought path to sobriety.

Quitter

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The Three Essential Prayers

A New York Times bestseller from the author of Dusk, Night Dawn, Hallelujah Anyway, Bird by Bird, and Almost Everything. Author Anne Lamott writes about the three simple prayers essential to coming through tough times, difficult days and the hardships of daily life. Readers of all ages have followed and cherished Anne Lamott’s funny and perceptive writing about her own faith through decades of trial and error. And in her new book, Help, Thanks, Wow, she has coalesced everything she knows about prayer to these fundamentals. It is these three prayers – asking for assistance from a higher power, appreciating what we have that is good, and feeling awe at the world around us – that can get us through the day and can show us the way forward. In Help, Thanks, Wow, Lamott recounts how she came to these insights, explains what they mean to her and how they have helped, and explores how others have embraced these same ideas. Insightful and honest as only Anne Lamott can be, Help, Thanks, Wow is the everyday faith book that new Lamott readers will love and longtime Lamott fans will treasure.

Help, Thanks, Wow

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Lee Yuk Sa

Sekyo Nam Haines

The complete  poems of Lee Yuk Sa

Born Lee Wonrok, Lee Yuk Sa (1904-1944) took his pen name from his prison cell number 264. A first-generation modern Korean poet, he wrote vernacular free verse accessible to everyone, and his poems illustrate the resilience of the human spirit in the face of colonial oppression. A member of the resistance movement known as the Korean Liberation Army, Lee Yuk Sa is also one of the most revered poets of the Japanese colonial period. Throughout the pages of THE BITTER SEASONS' WHIP, a bilingual collection of Lee Yuk Sa's complete works, Sekyo Haines' exquisite English translations bring to us the late poet's inner voice as he lived during one of the most fraught periods in Korean history. Despite existing under oppressive forces and enduring many imprisonments, during the last of which he died, Lee Yuk Sa's poetry is not bleak. His verse is calm and reflective, offering undercurrents of hope. His persistent search for a life of tranquility transcends time and place, continues to speak to today's tumultuous world. Poetry. Translation.

The Bitter Seasons' Whip

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Marika McCoola

From Eisner-Award nominated writer Marika McCoola and debut artist Aatmaja Pandya, an emotional coming-of-age graphic novel for fans of Bloom and Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me.



Right before Jade is about to leave for a summer art intensive, her best friend, Phoebe, attempts suicide. How is Jade supposed to focus on herself right now?



But at the Art Farm, Jade has artistic opportunities she's been waiting for her whole life. And as she gets to know her classmates, she begins to fall for whimsical, upbeat, comfortable-in-her-own-skin Mary. Jade pours herself into making ceramic monsters that vent her stress and insecurities, but when she puts her creatures in the kiln, something unreal happens: they come to life. And they're taking a stand: if Jade won't confront her problems, her problems are going to confront her, including the scariest of them all - if Jade grows, prospers, and even falls in love this summer, is she leaving Phoebe behind?

Slip

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Alfredo Vilchis Roque

Pierre Schwartz

Victoire Di Rosa

Herve Di Rosa

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Contemporary Mexican Votive Painting

Infinitas Gracias is the first collection of the work of Alfredo Vilchis Roque, one of Mexico's most famous contemporary painters, and his sons. In the tradition of Catholic votives, each painting tells a miraculous tale and gives thanks to the intervening saint. Ablaze with intense color hearkening back to the natural pigment dyes of ancient Mexico, these works portray the kaleidoscope of issues that constitute modern urban existence. With over 200 paintings, from circus adventures to household accidents to adultery, drugs, and prostitution, Infinitas Gracias weaves together a bizarre tapestry of stories, some disturbing, some comical -- all unerringly wrought and profoundly touching.

Infinitas Gracias

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Elena Ferrante

Ann Goldstein

A powerful new novel set in a divided Naples by Elena Ferrante, the beloved best-selling author of My Brilliant Friend. Giovanna's pretty face has changed: it's turning into the face of an ugly, spiteful adolescent. But is she seeing things as they really are? Into which mirror must she look to find herself and save herself? She is searching for a new face in two kindred cities that fear and detest one another: the Naples of the heights, which assumes a mask of refinement, and the Naples of the depths, which professes to be a place of excess and vulgarity. She moves between these two cities, disoriented by the fact that, whether high or low, the city seems to offer no answer and no escape.

Browse by categories

Ralph Ellison; Saul Bellow

The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison

Tarana Burke

Unbound

David Hempton

Evangelical Disenchantment

Susan Vreeland

Girl in Hyacinth Blue

Amy Ephron

A Cup of Tea

Jonathan Collins

Insights from the CoffeeHouse

Celia Paul

Self-Portrait

Emmanuel Iduma; Teju Cole; Abraham Oghobase

A Stranger's Pose

Rhonda Byrne

The Greatest Secret

Albert Camus; Arthur Goldhammer; Alice Kaplan

Algerian Chronicles

Enrico Pellegrini

Something Great and Beautiful

Suzanne Paola

The Lives of the Saints

Joan Acocella

Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints

Tess Gallagher

At the Owl Woman Saloon

David Lebovitz

The Sweet Life in Paris

Anne Lamott

Traveling Mercies

Andrew Sean Greer

Less (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

Erica C. Barnett

Quitter

Anne Lamott

Help, Thanks, Wow

Lee Yuk Sa; Sekyo Nam Haines

The Bitter Seasons' Whip

Marika McCoola

Slip

Alfredo Vilchis Roque; Pierre Schwartz; Victoire Di Rosa; Herve Di Rosa

Infinitas Gracias

Elena Ferrante; Ann Goldstein

The Lying Life of Adults

Sylvia Arthur

Ghana

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